The visualization of data is often overlooked, especially here in Asia. If you’re guilty of doing so, here are two consumer-facing campaign examples that should put the presentation of data back on your radar.

Netflix: #Cokenomics

In order to promote the TV show Narcos, which tells the story of Pablo Escobar, Netflix created infographics that brought the economy of the Columbian cocaine trade to life in a socially engaging way.

Netflix built a whole campaign around the Columbian cartel’s cocaine data under the hashtag #Cokenomics.

The Twitter account @NarcosNetflix has almost 67,000 followers and posts regular tweets such as this one:

Spotify: Found Them First

Spotify’s Found Them First gave music fans a way to prove that they were really into certain bands and singers before they actually became famous, for the bragging rights.

Users’ listening data was used to show users all the artists they had discovered ahead of other Spotify listeners.

Within weeks of the launch in October 2014, the campaign had received more than a million visits and 100 million social media impressions, all without any media spend.

Data tools

Data doesn’t actually need to be communicated to customers directly in most cases, but it’s important to get this across to internal stakeholders.

For such circumstances, there are several tools that can help you avoid the all-too-common walls of text with stock charts presentations, and substitute them with something a little more engaging and inspiring.

For example, if you are looking to beautify your charts, graphs, maps and timelines, check out the likes of RAW, Datawrapper, and Timeline JS.

Should you have a little more time on your hands, and you also know how to code, have a look at D3.js, which comes highly recommended by my own team’s creative technologist.

If you really want to up your data visualization game, you can take some inspiration from Hans Rosling, known for his unconventional ways of bringing subjects such as population growth and income equalities to life in a more tangible way.

2. Data-informed product design

Another space to watch is data-informed product design. Now I’m not talking here about your typical research-initiated product innovation cycle. I’m talking about an evolution of data visualization that quite literally and directly translates data into an actual product.

Here are three of my favorite projects within this space. I can’t wait to see more like this.

Flowing Data: Multivariate Beer

Nathan Yau from Flowingdata took U.S. demographics to brew four different types of beer.

For example, he mapped population density to the total amount of hops, and ethnicity to the type of hops used.

See Flowingdata’s website for a more detailed description of the process and other ways it transforms data.

Tempescope

This was invented by Japanese software engineer Ken Kawamoto. It’s a device which displays either current weather conditions or forecasts them physically.

Meshu

This is a concept which takes important life locations such as cities or even specific street addresses, maps the paths between them, and finally transforms them into a piece of jewelry.

The examples above demonstrate that there are no boundaries to data’s creativity, though a lot of it is still driven by artists, entrepreneurs and scientists. I hope that, in future, the marketing and advertising industry will recognise more strongly the beauty that lies within data and the compelling stories it can tell.

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.